Into You Series: The Complete Collection

24. Harry

CHAPTER 24

HARRY

T he rain is coming down in sheets outside.

I can barely make out Jessi’s car when she pulls up to the shop to drop off Saria, but the lights shine in through the windows enough to get my attention and have me taking the steps from the apartment two at a time to let her in.

When I open the door, Saria is already soaked to the skin from the few seconds it took to walk from Jessi’s car to here.

I chuckle at her appearance. Even covered in water, she’s beautiful. I can tell some of her makeup has started to smear, but it only gives her more of a badass look, like a metal superstar emerging from a mosh pit. That combined with her usual black getup, and I’m sold on her image.

“It’s a mess out there,” she says, sidestepping past me through the doorway.

My smile drops. Her tone is dismissive. Sure, we may not normally kiss or hug at first sight, but this greeting feels different. Purposeful. She couldn’t even fully look me in the eyes.

“Not the best time to be driving,” I say. “You want to stick around for a movie? I bet Cara already has one lined up.”

“Did she know I was coming over?” she asks.

Alarm bells go off in my head, but I let my stomach do the worrying for me. No need to cloud my mind with thoughts when it might be my last chance to be as clear as possible with her.

“No,” I say. It’s the truth. I didn’t tell Cara. I told her I was meeting a customer late and to hang tight. I said it wouldn’t take more than thirty minutes. I knew I had to do this alone. Best-case scenario, the three of us are up in that apartment watching some funny cartoon that also happens to make us cry within these next thirty minutes.

As it is, I’m two minutes in and already feeling like I might have overestimated this moment.

Saria shakes the rain from her hair, running her fingertips through it. The dampness only complements her look, giving her short cut the extra waves it needs to make her look like more of a fantasy than I thought possible.

“That’s probably good,” she says. “I’m running behind and it’d be too hard.”

My stomach continuing to take the brunt of the pain, I turn away and scratch the back of my head. A nervous tic. Something to distract me from the impending doom of this conversation.

“Running behind?” I ask.

“Yeah, I’m trying to get my stuff moved into Frankie before tomorrow.”

My gut smarts. “What happens tomorrow?”

“A subletter is coming by to look at my apartment,” she says. “I mean, she’s already signed so…”

“That’s fast.” The words fall out, but probably not as fast as that subletter signing on an apartment she’s never seen.

She shrugs in response. “My van is ready. Why wait?”

I laugh, but nothing about this is amusing.

“Yeah, I guess that was the plan…” I mutter.

We were supposed to be kissing by now, locked in some movie-type embrace. Saria was definitely not supposed to be walking over to the key rack, finding the one with the keychain I got her as a present and making her way over to Frankie to leave.

But Saria walks with purpose, hips swinging wide, boots creating an echo in the garage like a woman ready to kick ass and take names. Except she knows my name and she still isn’t kicking my ass. Only my fucking heart.

I run my hand through my hair again, tugging at the ends. This is a disaster. Where did my practiced lines go? The words I repeated over and over in the mirror? Where is that four-letter word I worked so hard to get out of my mind and onto my tongue? It’s stuck, paused in time, as I watch her open the passenger door, throw in her purse, and close it.

Saria saunters in front of the van, scuffing her boot on the floor. I’ve told her not to do that a billion times, said it might ruin the linoleum. But something else is on her mind, a kind of determination to do anything that might piss me off. She’s doing what she does best—being impulsive.

“You can’t drive in this rain,” I say through a choked laugh.

“It’s not gonna be hard,” she says. “This thing is a tank.” She pats Frankie’s pristine body.

“It’ll swerve right off the road,” I counter.

“I trust you to have made it safe enough.”

I did, but rain is still rain.

“You don’t wanna hang out for dinner?” I ask, throwing my thumb over my shoulder, trying again to be cordial in this clusterfuck of a conversation I didn’t anticipate. “We’re making brinner.”

“Nah, goodbyes always freak me out.”

And there are the words I dreaded. She’s doing it this way. She’s actually trying to cut ties this harshly. I don’t know if anyone has ever had a talk with Saria about not burning bridges, but if they did, she did not listen. In fact, I’d venture to say she might have taken notes but then scattered them on a bridge and burned it down.

Goodbyes.

My chest aches with the word. I knew this was coming, but it feels so callous. It’s lacking her heart. She’s doing this on purpose.

“What are you even doing?” I ask.

Saria looks to me then back to the ground, scuffing her boot again. “I’m leaving, Harry.”

“But…” I try to find the sentence, but it doesn’t want to come. The words are jumbled. I had a plan. What the hell happened to my plan ? “We’ve been in your life for three months and you’re just…out of here? Gone?” Those words will have to do.

She looks at me pointedly before rolling her eyes and scoffing, as if I’m the one saying I’m leaving.

“I can’t do this,” she says.

I shake my head, closing my eyes and rubbing my temples, trying to ease the tension forming at the base of my neck, building to the backs of my eyes.

“Do what?” I ask.

Her hands fly through the air. “Anything we’re trying to do right now.”

“I just want a proper goodbye.” My shoulders slump and I know these words, though unpracticed, are true. I knew she was going to leave, but if I can’t say what I need to say, I at least need this.

I can see her swallow. “We had one last night.”

I bark out a laugh. It’s strained. “That wasn’t a goodbye,” I scoff. “That was a beginning.”

“A beginning?” she says, her tone disbelieving and shocked. I’d venture to say offended, but I don’t know why. What part of yesterday seemed like it wasn’t a beginning?

“Come on, you know that wasn’t just you and me having sex in the back of a van,” I say. After almost twenty-four hours of mulling it over, I know this for a fact.

“That’s exactly what it was,” she counters.

I shake my head. “It was more than that.”

We share a look and the words pass between us—pure and cheesy, but true all the same.

We made love.

Not fucking. Not sex. Not dirty-mouthed, bend-her-over-the-workbench smut. We actually connected, and she’d have to be blind not to see that.

Saria shifts from foot to foot, breathing in a sharp inhalation before meeting my gaze once more.

“I gotta go,” she says. I can feel the pain building, that sting behind my eyes. Her statement feels so definitive. She put her foot down and I can’t say no. I don’t even have a chance to argue.

“Will you open the bay door?” she asks, looking from the van to the enclosed space, back to me. The rain outside pounds on the ceiling, beating down with enough force to knock over a telephone pole. No way in hell I’m letting her leave in this.

“No,” I say. “At least wait until it dies down out there.”

“If you won’t let me leave, I’ll walk home.”

“That’s absurd.”

Saria lifts an eyebrow, ever the defiant one, and makes her way back to the side entrance. It only takes three steps until I’m at her heels, reaching out for her hand. She spins in my grasp, looking up at me as I slowly back her against the wall beneath the staircase.

My thumb runs over her hand and into her palm; she spreads her fingers to allow mine to interlace with them. I love how smooth her hand is, how perfectly mine fits in hers. How perfect we are together—the wild princess and the straitlaced mechanic. Two contradictions together as one perfect juxtaposition.

Our foreheads press together, and she exhales into me. I close my eyes, breathing her in. Cinnamon. Fresh laundry. Rain.

“You can’t hold me captive,” she whispers.

“I’m not.”

She pulls away, and I loosen her hold on my hand. I let it fall as she walks past me.

“Saria—” I start, but she’s already ripping open the side door and out we both go, into the rain and night. I’m drenched before I can even call her name again. The rain showers around me, overpowering everything. My words are a shout as I try to call for her. “Saria, please.”

“Stop following me, Harry,” she yells.

And then, the words bubble up, almost to the surface but not quite.

“I don’t want you to leave,” I blurt out.

They’re just enough to hold weight, enough to get her to stop in her tracks—but they aren’t the words I truly need. They aren’t the ones beating in my head over and over, making my heart race and storm through my chest.

Saria twists on the heel of her boot, turning back around to face me. She shakes her head. Even through the rain, I can see that her cheeks are red.

“Harry, you can’t say that,” she says.

“Well I can’t fucking say what I really want to say.”

Everything around us is loud, the booming thunder in the distance, the pouring rain, and now the deafening silence as she looks at me from five feet away and asks, “What do you want to say?”

Then, like a dam being released, they come out of me, ready but completely unwilling: “I love you.”